Euronews

A train carrying flight MH17 victims has left the rebel-held town of Torez in eastern Ukraine.

Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister, Volodymyr Groysman, said the train would travel to the city of Kharkiv and that the bodies would then be taken to the Netherlands.

Two hundred and ninety-eight people, most of them Dutch, were killed when the Malaysia Airlines passenger jet crashed in territory controlled by separatist rebels.

The pro-Russian rebels, whom the Ukrainian government calls “terrorists”, said they would hand over the MH17 black boxes to the Malaysian authorities.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko told reporters in Kyiv: “The enormous pressure we arrange today on those people who control those terrorists will bring the efforts. And I cross my fingers, I hope, within the next 24 hours.”

Analysis of the black boxes will be one of the first steps in an independent international investigation into what caused the MH17 tragedy.